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Comment by mmcconnell1618 | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't tried to purchase a stock photo recently, it is incredibly difficult. I can order same day delivery of physical goods from Amazon much faster than trying to buy a single stock photo. All of the services are subscriptions now and they have dark UX patterns to convince you the only way to get the images is to sign up for an annual plan that will auto-renew.

In comparison, typing a prompt into a generative AI is a superior user experience. I'm willing to pay a photographer, they just don't make it easy.

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I'm not sure that is the case... I've used Shutterstock and Adobe Stock in the past two weeks and both times, it took about 3-4 minutes to find something I liked, and 10 sec (subscription) to 1 minute (non subscription) go through the license/payment cycle.

> All of the services are subscriptions now and they have dark UX patterns

They do. I have a subscription to one of the services, and it's just super easy and I use it enough it's worth the monthly. I'm not sure there's a huge market for licensing an image occasionally... It would be interesting to see the breakdown there. Also, Adobe has a huge advantage because Adobe Stock is highly integrated into Adobe's design software.

>I'm not sure there's a huge market for licensing an image occasionally.

Maybe for an iconic newsworthy photo.

But, yeah. As an individual, paying $50 or whatever for a photo for a book cover or something like that would be a rather rare thing. And if I'm a company who needs a steady stream of stock for articles, corporate presentations, etc., I'm almost certainly going to have a subscription if only for the convenience of not having to get individual purchases approved all the time.

> 1 minute (non subscription) go through the license/payment cycle

No, it takes me several minutes to get my lazy ass off my chair, go find my wallet which is inside some pants inside the laundry basket, pull it out, find my credit card, enter the number in, enter the billing address, enter the zip code only to find that Google autofill has now decided to edit my address, then go edit the address, only to find that Google autofill has decided to edit my city, go edit the city, then just go "screw this" and use Stable Diffusion.

If you want to minimize friction for payments (a) don't display any GDPR or newsletter popups (b) don't ask me to register an account or verify an e-mail address or phone number (c) just let me hold my credit card to the webcam to pay. Do NOT display 17 text boxes to fill in.

Also (d) please do not take this purchase as consent to enroll me in a perpetual drip marketing campaign

> it took about 3-4 minutes to find something I liked, and 10 sec (subscription) to 1 minute (non subscription) go through the license/payment cycle

It took around 5 minutes for me to even be allowed to download the free low res version of an image. Between forced signup (by clicking the “free download” button, with no indication of needing an account), waiting to confirm my account via email, and having to return to the page after forced redirects begging me to pay for a subscription I’ll never use, all for a single image to play with in GIMP.

I genuinely hate how predatory UX has become in recent years.

By way of comparison, look at the unreal marketplace or the unity asset store. It's easy to buy art on those sites. But almost nobody on there makes enough money to live off of. At the moment, I can only think of 1-2 creators on there who I think can live off their earnings, and they all live in parts of the world with low costs of living

IMO, the only value in selling assets on those stores is to attract the attention of companies who might want to hire you for real work

It's not viable to have an art company without some way to drive repeat transactions. Subscriptions are the only thing they can come up with that keeps the companies afloat and able to pay people's salaries

But yeah, I sure don't like them as a customer

Photography is a valuable skill, but stock photography and footage have been too overvalued for a long time. I'm not surprised that they're having a rude awakening in the face of things like Stable Diffusion. For most purposes, stock photos and illustrations don't have to be perfect, but just good enough. Or good enough for an amateur to make finishing corrections to.

That said, it also seems like the industry needs to be disrupted. Not by AI per se, but by competition that wants to sell itself as stock photos without the bullshit.

AI may be replacing the photographer, but stock photography was/is its own specialized skill.

You say dark patterns, but the true dark behavior is AI copying (^H^H learning from) all those stock photos and giving them away for free.

You’re right but it does t help when media companies always are customer unfriendly. People start rooting for the thief when the owner is such a jerk.

It's truly evil that aspiring artists go to museums, copying (^H^H learning from) the masters

These stacks of gpus are not people. Repeat with me. These stacks of gpus are not people.

Strawman argument - nobody is claiming that stacks of GPUs are people.

Well, corporations are people, so I’m sure sufficiently large stacks of GPUs are also legally (parts of) people too.

Though I’m not sure what place the US Supreme Court’s opinions have in rational discourse at this point.

And art cannot be controlled once it is released to the public. If you don't want people to see it, if you're too cowardly to accept the all the consequences that come with it, then don't release your art. It's really that simple.

It doesn't matter if it's my eyes and brain, the computer working for me, or the eye of Sauron for that matter. Once the cat is out of the bag, any control you think you have over it is an illusion, propped up by laws that are easy to evade.

That's a cute line to stochastically parrot, not something which anyone yet knows how to even test the truthfulness or falsity of.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, buying from Getty, iStock, Shutterstock, Adobe, etc is pretty seamless. Maybe you mean if you don't have an existing account? But in the case...why would you be buying a stock photo? I still also occasionally use Unsplash, but I've never had a single issue buying a stock photo.

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